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Saturday, 13 November 2010

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion was released on 14th October 2010. It was published by Vintage and is 256 pages long. I was lucky enough to win this in a competition on Twitter.

Plot

The only thing R knows about himself is that he is a zombie. He has no memories of anything about his former life, not even his own name. Unlike the other zombies, he is able to dream even if he can’t make any sense of them. R knows what he has to eat to survive but that doesn’t mean he has to like it or want to do it.

Out on a hunt for food (humans), R manages to meet a girl who he refuses to eat. There is something about her and he just can’t bring himself to kill her. He goes against everything he knows, goes against surviving, just to save a girl he knows as Julie. In a world where they should be enemies, R befriends Julie and promises to keep her safe, taking her home with him. As he spends more and more time with her, R’s speech develops and he is able to say more and more by the day. He knows there is something different about Julie. She makes him want to dream. She makes him want to be alive. R is changing and he is no longer like the other zombies. Times are hard and everything is against R being able to spend time with the girl who is changing everything he known for a long time.

What I thoughtI was so excited when I won this book because I hadn’t read anything about zombies and this was one that I was hoping to love. It sounded exactly like the kind of book that I would usually pick myself.

As much as I read books about vampires, werewolves and demons, most of which I love if they are the main characters, I really didn’t think that I would ever love a zombie in the same way. So they all have eating or killing people in common but for a zombie, there just isn’t anything sexy or hot about it. If anything, I think I loved the main zombie in this book ‘R’ so much more than any other hero I have read about in a long time. The whole story is told from R’s point of view and he had me from the first couple of lines.

“I’m dead but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it. I’m sorry I can’t properly introduce myself, but I don’t have a name anymore.”

R lives (or doesn’t live) in a world where zombies/ the infected are taking over and there are very few humans left. He lives in an abandoned airport and sleeps in an aeroplane. Even though he doesn’t really have feelings and can only speak the most basic words, he is different from the other zombies because he is more aware of what is going on around him. He wonders about who he was when he was alive and what kind of a life he used to have due to the fact that he gets snippets of the lives of the people’s brains that he eats. R doesn’t want to be a zombie and from very early on, it seemed that he would have done anything to be alive again.

When Julie enters the scene, R knows that it is wrong to save her, that the others of his kind are hungry and need to feed, but he can’t help himself. I instantly liked Julie because she seemed like the kind of girl that you wouldn’t want to mess with. She’s had a pretty bad time of it since the dead took over and she isn’t about to let the zombies take over her as well. Julie tries to see the best about her situation after R kind of kidnaps her. She takes it upon herself to try to talk to him and to find out more about the zombies, even though he has the most basic language skills. At times where R would shrug off an answer, Julie makes him talk to her instead. All of these little things added to R wanting to be alive again, remembering little bits at a time. Julie really brought out the best in R, making him want to be better in order to get what he wanted. There is a lot more going on between Julie and R that has a massive impact on the story but I don’t really want to say anything about that because it is too spoilery.

Isaac Marion created a world that I was fully absorbed in. The dead have pretty much taken over everything and there are barely any humans anymore. The humans that have managed to survive are all in hiding, trying to survive and make the best of what they have left. Not only are there zombies but something called The ‘Boneys’. As you can imagine from the name, they are skeleton like and are a hell of a lot more scary than the zombies. There was so much going on in this world that it would be hard to not have a million thoughts running through your head as the story goes on. I wanted to know why the dead took over because no one knows this. I wanted to know what was going on in the rest of the world and how the dead had spread. I wanted to know what human kind were doing to survive and if they were planning on just repopulating even though supplies were limited. There were so many questions I would have liked answered but the mystery of the story was one of the things that I really enjoyed. Normally I would class this as a bad thing, not knowing, but I can’t fault it this time around because it just added to making this story amazing.

Warm Bodies is far from being all doom and gloom and about the end of the world though. The story is exciting and action packed, moving along at a quick pace. There was always something going on, no matter how small the event, that kept my interest throughout. Warm Bodies is a heart warming love story about wanting to be better for the sake of someone else as well as yourself. Warm Bodies is witty and humourous and it had me laughing even when I didn’t think it would be possible. The characters suck you into their world and don’t let go until the very end. I can’t praise this book enough but I will say that it surpassed my every expectation. Not read about zombies yet? This is the book to start with!

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